Listen to a Townes Van Zandt Song From Heartworn Highways

At the end of 1975, director Jim Szalapski and a small band of fledgling filmmakers packed their cameras and drove south to parts unknown, at least to them. Tennessee was “like stepping onto another planet,” Graham Leader, the London-born producer of the soon-to-be-rereleased documentary Heartworn Highways remembers now. “Their world was so exotic and different from mine.” Nashville had re-entered the national consciousness anew that year via Robert Altman’s film of the same name, and the city was weathering its own growing pains: After the Grand Ole Opry departed its longtime home at Ryman Auditorium for shinier, newer digs, the honky-tonks where aspiring performers and songwriters once gathered now picked up and moved on; a tawdry scene of pawn shops and porn stores cropped up in their wake. The Holy Trinity of Nashville songwriters had split, too—this was the era in which Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson forsook the strictures of Music Row and went “outlaw,” striking out fully on their own.

But they left the door open behind them for a like-minded community of musicians to thrive, carrying on their practice of writing and playing their own original songs. “We were all post-Kristofferson,” Steve Earle, one subject of the film, recently said of the time. They gravitated away from the former Lower Broadway haunts to lesser-known bars and back rooms to jam sessions at off-the-beaten-path places like the Wigwam Tavern, nights that would spill over after hours into the living room of Guy Clark, who’d just released his second solo album, and his painter wife, Susanna, in nearby Hendersonville. On the shores of a little lake and down the road from June and Johnny Cash, the Clarks’ comparatively unassuming house was a second home for their good friend Townes Van Zandt when he came to town, and on any given night for a crowd of others, as their living room filled with more friends and guitars.

On Christmas Eve, 1975, Szalapski and his crew stumbled on just such a scene: Earle and Rodney Crowell and Steve Young and others lingering around Guy and Susanna’s kerosene-lamplit table long after dinner, pleasantly soused, taking up their guitars. At the stroke of midnight, Guy’s son wandered downstairs and their offhand Hank Williams sing-along turned to Christmas, too, seguing impromptu into “Silent Night.” “It still gives me chills,” says Phillip Schopper, the editor of the film. “It was one of the most amazing nights in my life; it just went on and on, one song into another.”

In the way that beginnings are also endings, that scene becomes the final one in the film, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year via a restored edition from Light in the Attic. The Seattle-based record label of new and reissued music is best known for the lesser-knowns on its roster and is one of the finest of its kind. They released the catalog of Rodriguez, the now-famously searched-for Sugarman; they are the go-to reissue label for Lee Hazlewood and Karen Dalton; they fill the collector’s gaps by returning the rare Thin Lizzy or Sly Stone LP to print; when the singer Jim Sullivan vanished in the desert leaving behind only sparse clues—a wallet, an empty car—they put out his album of weirdly transcendent Southwestern folk. They are the masters of the rediscovery of the second-string player, the resurrection of the forgotten or obscure artist, giving second life to unsung musicians. And Heartworn Highways—now accompanied by a double LP “whiskey-colored” vinyl soundtrack of the songs performed live in the film, 45 minutes of extra footage, and a deeply engrossing book by Sam Sweet—is an uncommon, intimate portrait of kindred musicians, an idiosyncratic and close-knit community of individuals on the cusp of breaking out. “We didn’t want it to be overshadowed by musicians who were already famous,” Leader says. “I felt that was more synchronous with the material we already had, which was authentic and great on its own.”

Earle, Crowell, Young, and company are “names” now, but back then David Allan Coe was piloting his own tour bus as he headed to his next gig, performing at a Tennessee prison where, days before, a riot had taken place. Granted, it was a tour bus emblazoned with his own image and “RHINESTONE” destination sign, as if its bedazzled occupant could possibly go incognito; and granted, as he announces over CB radio, his last concert was opening for Willie Nelson for 10,000 people (“10-four to you and Big Willie!” comes the response), but he hadn’t attained that kind of headliner status himself. Several highways away in Austin, Texas, Van Zandt was living in a trailer surrounded by goats and rabbits in a scraggly rundown lot with a teenage girlfriend.

The whole movie feels like as much of a natural, lovely accident as its “Silent Night” sing-along, but it’s marked by tragedy too. The bass player Skinny Dennis, who introduced director Szalapski to the Clarks, died suddenly onstage shortly after filming. Szalapski passed away in 2000, before the film was ever really shown—“He died thinking he made a film that was irrelevant,” Leader says now. And Van Zandt had preceded him in death, on New Year’s Day, 1997, succumbing to the effects of a near lifetime of addictions. His appearance in the film is colored by that foreshadowing—one of the most riveting and affecting moments is when Van Zandt sits in a kitchen playing “Waitin’ Round to Die” (listen to the soundtrack version here) on a borrowed guitar. “This is the first song I ever wrote,” he begins. Listening on, with teary, red-rimmed eyes is his neighbor and friend “Uncle” Seymour Washington, aka the Walking Blacksmith, who’s been shoeing horses his entire life.

“Townes had been drunk the day before, and he had a scratch on the side of his face from where he’d fallen down, so he gets a little chiding in that scene from Seymour,” says Schopper. Washington speaks in near parables, which end with a clear moral, delivered to the young singer with winking good nature: “You don’t have to drink a barrel of whiskey just because you see a barrel of whiskey sitting there.”

Earlier, Van Zandt “interviews” Seymour on camera, his idea. “Townes was way too slippery to agree to let us do a traditional interview with him; he wanted to take us on a tour of his lot instead,” Schopper says. Van Zandt, with his girlfriend Cindy, and his dog Geraldine, greets the crew in a shearling jacket on a chilly Texas day, lanky and laconic and cracking terrible jokes. He’s triple-fisting—a can of Coke, a bottle of whiskey, which he stops to swig from while he has the sudden forethought to ask his girlfriend to hold the third item for him, a rifle.

“Townes was always challenging you; you never knew quite what was coming next. He was extremely interesting, but he’d keep you off-balance,” Leader says. “He was so alert and brilliant, and Jim had the presence of mind to film him with absolute objectivity. He wasn’t someone to go in and rearrange the furniture. He would figure out how to light the room, where the soundman should go, and then he would get out of the way.”

The Heartworn Highways crew filmed Coe’s prison act—“We weren’t sure how the prisoners were going to react to this guy in a rhinestone costume,” Schopper says. And yet somehow the man who stepped to the mic with his nickname glittering up and down the sash around his dazzling jumpsuit, whose real name was spelled out in more sparkle on his back and oversize belt buckle, whose earrings dangled from below his feather-tailed hat, proved to be as much a hit as Cash at Folsom or San Quentin. He may have shown up like some kind of Southern Doodle Dandy who landed in Vegas, but his own jailhouse tales proved he was one of them.

Sweet-talking their way into filming at the prison was an easier sell than getting into Nashville’s tougher barrooms, or even the seemingly benign Wigwam Tavern. Big Mack McGowan, a man whose nickname is no accident, stood up rapidly and left his chair as Szalapski and Schopper, not-from-around-these-parts longhairs, walked in his front door. “He spoke to us from behind the bar,” Schopper says. “But he warmed up, and later he admitted he was holding on to his gun the whole time. We said, ‘you’re kidding.’ But he shook his head and took out this little derringer, this little two-barreled gun. We said, ‘well, but it can’t be loaded.’ And he smiled and shot a hole right there in the floor of his own bar.”

“I didn’t even know that story!” Leader says. In the resulting scenes at the Wigwam, McGowan bemoans the current state of Nashville music (“I think they’re a bit snobbish,” he says; and later, “I believe that Johnny Cash has done shot his wad”). A frizzy-haired woman in a satin shirt and hipster belt, backed by a bespectacled fellow in a turtleneck, sings a song called “Let’s Go All the Way”; they look like a country version of the Velvet Underground. And McGowan keeps time on drums as his friend Smokey Mountain Glenn sings an ode to Jack Daniels whiskey. In one of the film’s major shooting coups, this segues into a sequence at an actual Jack Daniels distillery, where factory workers with crosses hung around their necks keep watch over a mesmerizing procession of the product in question; bottle after bottle spirals its way down the conveyor belt, surely destined to take up residence in the crook of Van Zandt’s arm, or on Guy Clark’s dinner table.

For a while the working title of Heartworn Highways was “New Country,” which, ironically, was not yet the genre of Hank III and Garth Brooks, but it did happen to be the brand name of a yogurt, prompting a lucky cease-and-desist name change. It’s a sentimental title, sure, but this is a movie that isn’t afraid to go there; more important, neither is the music, which, captured on the film, is raw, intimate, and funny even, and frequently just plain phenomenal. “They weren’t the outside people to us; they were the center. We felt it was pure. We had our hearts on our sleeves,” Leader says now. As the film unfolds in its laid-back directions, looking through Coe’s windshield as he 10-fours his good buddies along the road, driving past an overturned tractor-trailer and exit signs for the small mountain towns of Tennessee, it rings right.